This disclosure relates generally to online content campaigns, and more specifically to calibrating the pacing of online content.
When initiating content campaigns to present content to users of an online system, a sponsor may specify a budget to be spend over a time period. The sponsor's content competes with other content sponsors for presentation to users, and portions of the budget may be allocated compete with other sponsors in an auction. To adjust the amount of the budget that is bid in a given placement opportunity, a pacing factor adjusts the actual bid upwards or downwards to increase or decrease the likelihood of winning the auction (and spending the campaign budget). The pacing factor may be applied to a maximum bid amount to determine the auction bid used in the auction.
Initially, a content sponsor may not know a pacing factor to successfully place advertisements at a rate consistent with the desired budget and time period. The pacing factor may impact the spending rate of the content campaign, resulting in over- or under-spending the specified budget when poorly selected. When the pacing factor is too high, the content campaign may win too many auctions early in the time period for the campaign and at a higher value. When the pacing factor is too low, time lapses in the time period for which no spending occurs, reducing the effective time period for the campaign and losing the opportunity to place content in the initial portion of the campaign's time period.
When determining the initial pacing factor, the pacing factor may be increased until the campaign successfully wins an auction and the content is presented to users. While increasing the pacing, overshooting a pacing factor that generates the desired spending rate may also be problematic because there may be a delay between the selection of the content (in winning the auction) and determining that the budget has been spent for the campaign. For example, the content may be selected for a user but the content may never be delivered to the user. In additional cases, the budget for the campaign may not be spent until a later conversion event occurs, such as a user interacting with the content or interacting with a sponsor's webpage. If the pacing factor is increased too quickly while those events can still occur, if those events do occur it may trigger significant overspending of the budget early in the time period for the campaign.